Social media monitoring and packaged care: Pick UPS, Push UPS

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation by UPS's Debbie Curtis-Magley at Tuesday's Blogwell in San Jose. Her topic was social media monitoring, and her team's experiences watching conversational media for UPS-related traffic. Keen to learn what tools they used, and with what success, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that social media tracking is still a matter best left to humans -- tools not yet being able to capture conversations accurately and automatically. What eavesdropping tool would know, as she cited to pointed laughter, that push ups and sit ups bear no relation to pick UPS, the company's tagline?!

While UPS seemed to be tracking conversations as well as we consumers track UPS, conversational marketing and monitoring is still in its infancy. The great difficulty of tuning your tools to the tone of conversation (I like Radian6 and Visible Technologies), the challenge of reading the sentiment and gist from between lines kerned 140 characters wide (Twitter), not to mention spotting influencers and mapping their networks, all suggest that this is a job for specialists. Thankfully, the particular skill involved comes naturally to all of us: it's conversation.

According to Debbie, UPS tracks about four topics over time, with other short-term issues identified as they come up. Her company has established goals and objectives that include an interest in learning from its customers, identifying pain points, and reputation topics, all with the interest of refining corporate and brand messaging. Writ large, they are "using monitoring to learn about the topics that matter to the brand," and are tracking how their brand is being talked about, to "learn how to better provide information to customers."

Several things struck me about UPS. Clearly, the team gets the importance of listening. And in fact Debbie's collaboration with customer service resources was testament to that (all important) insight. UPS, too, is making creative use of internal "driver" blogs, and extending the relationship between its truck drivers and auto-racing drivers (UPS is a NASCAR sponsor, though I suspect their track vehicle of choice is not a van, and operates with its doors closed) with racy first-person narratives. So it has both an internal and public commitment to the medium. It clearly gets the value of watching conversations for customer complaints, and is engaged in ways of addressing and redressing, dare I say re-packaging, customer dissatisfaction.

What I liked the most about the UPS approach was that it emphasized the importance of listening. So much social media marketing still emphasizes the talking. Brands are used to packaging their messages, and deliver them to audiences at great expense. So no, it's not surprising that in social media monitoring they hope to track results. But by viewing the medium as yet another distribution network, they risk missing its greatest strengths.

Which is in part why I still firmly believe that this whole social media marketing thing is still in its infancy. Taking UPS as a springboard for some creative whiteboarding (!), then, here's what I would do if I were the guy with the marker.

Start from the customer's perspective -- it's his/her conversation, after all, and his/her social medium. Advertisers are not as of yet welcome at the table.

Listen to the customer -- what is s/he saying, about what, to whom, and why. Read between the lines, and stick with it. Tools cannot do this, but they can be essential to narrowing down the conversation space, identifying influencers, and mapping the terms and keywords, plus gestures, of the conversation itself.

Join the conversation -- it may be that there is a best person for this within a company, for in fact tone, style, personality and delivery rule here. Conversational talk is not at all like branding, brand messaging, or brand presentation.

Join the conversation, really -- many examples of social media marketing today more closely resemble "adjoining conversations," not joined conversations. That could be a catchphrase, in fact, if it weren't negative: "ad-joining conversational marketing." Be with, not alongside, your customers; let monitoring be a means of eavesdropping that serves the purpose of getting aligned, but don't stay on the sidelines.

Contribute -- social media marketing should be designed around talking, not marketing: talk addressed to people who are talking (new school), not messaging in front of audiences that are looking (old school).

Structure the conversation -- here's where it gets interesting, and where we're going to do some of that whiteboarding. Online conversations are highly unstructured, even informal. The media used tend to flatten out the tonality, sentiment, and delivery of messaging, and outside of social networking sites, the forms of speech users adopt are, well, relatively formless.

What do I mean by this? Well, there are many different kinds of linguistic claims, or statements. Questions, requests, instructions, promises, and so on -- we can recognize them without having to think about it. Social media help users reach audiences of unknown members, and thus users will flatten out statements to appeal to greater numbers of people, while upsetting the fewest number of people. The conversations are generally informal and unstructured: not easily used.

So how about this: design a conversational marketing program around themes, topics, and formats that are natural and familiar, but which you can use and extend. These become brand conversation containers. They will contain messaging points, marketing claims, calls to action (interaction too!), and so on. They can use familiar social media genres, or adapted mass media and cultural forms (invitations, birthdays, top tens, gifts, quizzes, etc).



Let's whiteboard an idea for UPS:

Care packages. The idea here leverages the brand messenger par excellance for UPS: quite literally, the brand driver. The goal is to get conversation going around the brand. The vehicle: use social media to solicit donations to Thanksgiving care packages. Use twitter to solicit Thanksgiving greetings and wishes. Users (customers) donate stuff, or sponsor stuff, to be delivered, with messages, to the elderly at the driver's discretion.

UPS demonstrates that it cares, and gets its customers involved by packaging *their* care. (Why not have customers vote on care package designs contributed by the public, and composed of the tweeted messages. Maybe even localize the messaging...) The brand shows that it cares that its customers care, and wants to be the vehicle of appreciation and concern. Drivers post gratitudes to a company blog. Comments are collected. Branding and service become a mutual win-win.

Gas Think Tank. This is totally off the top of my head, so here goes tapping the thinking cap for a gas tank meter. UPS gets transparent with its customers about the high cost of gas, and the company's role in climate change, by sharing gross gas expenditures and carbon output on a blog, let's call it "the UPS think tank." There, it solicits ideas and contributions from customers about how to reduce its carbon "tire mark," offering to fund investment in ways to green the brown van. These might include sponsored online causes, use of twitter hashtags, perhaps even sponsorship of a commuter or car-sharing site where UPS drivers offer to carshare to work if customers do the same.


Conversational marketing can be much more interesting than just watching the brief and fleeting messages posted to social media that directly reference your brand. We're really just at the tip of the iceberg. The brands that show success will be those that can shift from talking about themselves to talking to their customers. I honestly believe that if brands structure their efforts to create conversational brand extensions, there will be a flourishing of new and compelling creativity in social media campaigns. These can be cost-effective, engaging, and learning moments.

During times like these, we should all consider how to step up, save money, and do some good.


More from UPS Monitoring social media for big business: Guest Blogger - Debbie Curtis-Magley, UPS

More tips on social media and PR

Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

The lights went down at the Fillmore and with a roar a reconfigured Smashing Pumpkins lit up their instruments. The crowd moved forward and you could feel the place slot into full-on sound and fury. I was one among friends, gutless pride at having scored an extra ticket, and lost in the crush that any honest concert goer yearns for on occasion: lust for a total experience.

And there I was -- only one of many to hold up a camera and shoot a brief bit of video, when the lights went green, like neon rails, oscillating to a beating wall of sound. Around me, phones came out of pockets and were held aloft, too many for security to have done anything about. It had become OK to take a memento. We got ours, LoFi.

This was just over a year ago. It took that long for the music industry to realize the free marketing power its brands (bands) enjoy from the posted concert videos and pictures that are such a cultural staple on Youtube. But this post is not about marketing -- it's about the experience. That night, doing that, I felt there was something "elsehwere" about seeing all those cameras and phones dancing over heads and straining for an angle on the show.

There was this strange blurring of here and there, or here and elsewhere, that all those phones seemed to suggest, and which in many ways stained the purity of being there. Akin, in feeling at least, to watching overzealous tourists snapping away at an art museum without so much as absorbing the real thing while standing there in its presence and singularity. Something that suggested the ambivalence I have personally felt, nearly always, about bringing along a camera to important social rituals -- and to nature especially -- fearing that I might not manage the negotiation from observing to being there.

The slippage between being there and not being there seems real to me. Not only does taking a video at a concert involve a small number of technical hurdles, and the matter of paying attention to the camera long enough to miss some of the show. There is also the mental shift of considering the person, or site, audience, etc. that we do it for. Recording for the purpose of sharing always involves "for whom is it done," even when this is nobody in particular. And this step in the recording or capturing of a live event seems at a step removed from being in it.

This "being here" and "being there" comes up in other cases, I've noticed, where a mediating technology is involved. I've watched panhandlers approach friends hanging/smoking outside a bar, and deliberately choose to interrupt the ones engaged in conversation instead of the person on the phone. Interesting, and even counter-intuitive, it seemed to me. Until you realize that the panhandler can negotiate the interruption with two people who are co-present better than with only one person (the other being at the other end of the phone).

Being here and being there, or the slippage between private and social, comes up in social media all the time. Twitter is a great example of a tool used to post in front of "everyone." Inspired in part by Facebook's status feeds, Twitter allows users to post to a greater audience. Unlike the member's audience on Facebook, which is most often his or her friends, audiences on Twitter are a mix of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and other unknown followers. (UFOs: Unknown Following Others. ?!!)

The kind of audience we find ourselves in informs and shapes our behavior. When the context of interaction is mediated, however, we are bound by the kind of audience that we imagine, expect, or believe. When we tweet, we have a notion of who's reading us, whether we believe that it's just one person or a lot more than one person, and whether we believe others are online now, paying attention, or not. Any medium that puts us in front of a "virtual" audience must have a way of presenting that audience back to us. (This is another reason that lifestreaming applications present content, which is messages from people, in a stream or flow, rather than on a page.)

And there, in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?

Answering this question seems imperative if we are to grasp the root motivation behind participating in social media. For we all recognize that in all things social media, presence, attention, intention, and connection frame the medium's usage as well as its application and extension across markets and industries. Social media produce presence and as such are means of producing the Self.

This line of reflection came back somewhat jarringly while I was reading the compelling article on the late and magnificent author David Foster Wallace. DFW had suffered depression most of his adult life, and it manifested in a kind of writing that he used to quiet his self doubts and profound lack of a sense of true self. Occupying an other's voice, getting under their skin, writing through them, was for him a way of occupying a Self.

"He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.'" -- Rolling Stone

This navigation between a genuine and true Self, and a false, inauthentic Self, limns the article. To Wallace, this was not only a depressive symptom, it was a matter of writing itself. Writing for and in front of an audience is a production of the Self -- but one experienced very differently by the author than by his audience. In his own words, Wallace described the gap:

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely."

And as the Rolling Stone author David Lipsky observed, Wallace's inner experience of Self not only inspired his best work (as when he made his characters his own), but may have also manifested a profound dislocation of being himself.

"In a way, the difference between fiction and the nonfiction reads as the difference between Wallace's social self and his private self. The essays were endlessly charming, they were the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. Wallace's fiction, especially after Infinite Jest, would turn chilly, dark, abstract."

(From Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008. See also: Getting to Know David Foster Wallace)

This resonated for me, as I can often feel a shift in my own relation to social media, as if they are sometimes near, sometimes far. I am sometimes more aware of my inner experience, sometimes more aware of the audience. Sometimes more aware of what it is I want to say, and of how to say it; and sometimes more aware of how it might go over, what effect it may have. These seemed to be the way in which David Foster Wallace wrote his way through life. Being comfortable with the switch, with being here vs being there, was not a problem DFW experienced online -- it was a problem he experience in daily life. Again, DFW:

"For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried a out whether you like me."

I can't imagine how difficult the days must have been for Wallace. A fan for years, I hadn't known that his writing was in some ways symptomatic, if not pathological. That he needed to write in order to produce Self, and that a fictional Self was at least better than a doubt-ridden Self.

Coming back then to social media, and of the juxtaposition of two modes of presence that they sometimes engender (here/there), I wondered whether or not our relation to the medium might in itself create the types of conditions that Wallace experienced most acutely. Granted, the subtext to the "follow you, follow me" phenomenon is a simple and basic condition (it would seem) of the human experience: validation, acknowledgment, recognition. We all need it, as much if not more than food or any other kind of sustenance.

But getting it is a matter of interacting with others, and this raises the contingency of experiencing oneself while being in the world, with others. We wish to be with, not next to, one another (IMHO). I have often believed that any mediation of communication and interaction disables and hobbles this process. Here is one of my favorite sources, the sociologist Erving Goffman, on the matter:

"These two tendencies, that of the speaker to scale down his expressions and that of the listeners to scale up their interests, each in the light of the other's capacities and demands, form the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement. It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world." Erving Goffman

Which gets us back to technologies like Twitter and the cameras out at the Pumpkins concert, which certainly did light things up. Is there in writing, and in mediated writing, a doubling up of the Self experience, along the lines described by Wallace? A kind of "You're Ok, How am I?" (which is an old Transactional Analyst's joke) that comes packaged perhaps in "I'm Ok, How are You?" A sort of linguistic doubling of the exchange, required to compensate for the obvious fact that one is not with the other -- one is not able to look the other in the eye, and scale interests up or down to create a shared stretch of time and mutually shared experience. That when there is a gap between the production of self, say in posting to social media, we anticipate the effects of our contributions while authoring them? That the doubling up of private self (the self that experiences participation) and social self (the self that sees itself seen in social media) might always result in ambiguity?

And that, unable to engage in "sustained involvement" with one another, we supply as much of the meaning as we can by using the writing, the speaking, the posting, sharing, and other contents of posted participation as possible. For the media are so thin on the ritual, ceremonial, and contextual aspects of the interaction that we can't use the normal social scaffolding of face to face interactions to prop up the encounter. The result being that in participating on social media, we over-invest in expression, and under-invest in reciprocation. Thus lending a bias to all mediated interaction in favor of unilateral experiences: a social, in other words, that's not very social.

I think that, at the end of the day, social media trade in the ambiguity of human relationships and communication. Failing to close the loop on proximity, they offer a nearness that is still disconnected, or to quote the title of the Wim Wenders film, "Faraway, So Close." And it is this unresolved ambiguity that underlies our motives and behavior on social media. We might close the loop now and then when a conversational turn or run develops, on Twitter or in commenting for example, but we still pump the space with a high level of communicative redundancy (posting overwhelms reading). We want to know the effect of our participation and this condition of the user experience is reflected in our use practices.

Media transform experience, and while they amplify and extend some of our abilities, they bracket and constrain others. As we increasingly adopt social media as means of being social, whether to author, share, engage, search, or consume each other's contributions, it does those of us who make and trade in social media well to understand that a medium is used as much for what it does not do as for what it does do.

Social media dis-embed the experience of being in a social encounter from the fact of being in a social encounter: they represent and manufacture a semblance of social context on the basis of dislocated presence. This is what grounds the individual user experience, from which social practices emerge as new forms of mediated interactions. These are not media of information to be searched and browsed, but of communication and presence sensed and solicited: to wit, the power of absence and the possibility of ambiguity.

When I think now about where this began, with the matter of being here and being there, and of a private self and a social self, the doubling of experience might be summed up neatly, in a double entendre. For the question of motive can be captured, indeed, with the words: "for whom is it done."




Related:
Games People Play post
Reading notes on Transactional Analysis and Social Media
Social media: Social Approximity?

Cisco Disco Very Video: Cisco Uses Vlogs.

I'm at blogwell in San Jose, listening to John Earnhardt Cisco Systems and Ken Kaplan from Intel discuss corporate blogging strategies. Cisco favors video, which is in keeping with its own telepresence efforts. Video has been more natural fit for Cisco because it is faster (to make), and more immediate and direct than writing. Drafts do not have to circulate before being published to a public-facing blog. According to Earnhardt, video is used by executives for corporate communication purposes and CEO John Chambers himself instituted regular video blogging in part to motivate his executive team (leading by example).

Video blogging does make sense for Cisco. Earnhardt called it "the future." Whether used for technology demos (he cited their ecofriendly Green Bus) or for executive interviews and statements, its directness offers a clear advantage over blogging. I think it's interesting that these companies have developed communities of practice internally -- achieving a comfort level and sharing accountability (brand managers, IT, legal, executives, marcomm) inside the company to build a public-facing practice.

I wonder whether or not a preference for writing or video might also be a matter of executive personality. And whether the preferred medium of communication might also be intrinsic to a brand's product or business. That doesn't come up much at events like these: we tend to look for global solutions, generalizable learnings and best practices. But if a company has a very visual business, or one in which personality is the brand's identity, it may wish to use video. By contrast, a company whose products require arguments, claims, or explanations for positioning may wish to use the advantages of written communication to develop public appeal. I don't know if there's a correlation between mode of media and the nature of what's being communicated. Worth thinking about.

Interestingly, I recently saw a short Cisco video "From Frisco to Cisco." (it's been renamed: Cisco to Launch a Car? Why not call it "Driving the Cisco Kid" or "Cisco: not kidding around" or .. ) In contrast to what I heard today, which focused on the authenticity of having the company CEO describe company efforts in his own words, without scripting, this video was scripted, acted, and staged. It was marginally funny, and did little over its 2 and half minutes other than to build up to a meeting with CEO John Chambers (an encounter lost on the PR/press person sent to speak with him).

I suppose the idea was to raise the entertainment value of the video. But if you're going to do that, and use your CEO, either your CEO has to have celebrity value (e.g. Steve Jobs) or your video has to be really good. Given the difficulty of pulling off something truly funny while staging it, and given that the CEO appears in his own vlogs already, I don't see how the strategy can work. It walks a fine line (being too corny; being disingenuous; bad or poor taste) -- and would seem to risk the investment Cisco has already made in transparency and straight-laced corporate integrity.

If I were Cisco I'd develop the cheesy narrative such that in the end it falls on the corporate chopping block, and is replaced with the original, genuine and authentic CEO chat. A sort of new coke, old coke thing. But those are just my 2 cents.

What Goes Up One Way Comes Down Another

I've had a few notes sitting here in my text editor on asymmetries in social systems. For example, that when the stock market is rising, it has no upper limit; but when falling, its lower limit is very real.

• That in the stock market, the purchase of shares is an extension of trust on the part of the investor.
  
• That purchase, as a transaction between buyer and seller, is a bet on the future.
  
• That trust in markets is extracted, and invested, in the future : and set in the price of exchange.
  
• That the transaction uses price as its expression -- but is no less a system of communication than any other.
  
• That trust also characterizes social networks
  
• That this trust is also extended by means of a transaction -- in this case, however, the transaction is a "connection" and not an exchange
  
• That the medium or currency of the social marketplace is may be the "interest" that we take in each other, and which we can show one another by paying attention
  
• That the basis of transactions in a social system is a handshake (of sorts)
  
• But that in the imperfect social system that is social media, the handshake is rare : a form of unilateral and monological communication prevails, often unanswered
  
• That this produces a high degree of redundancy (noise), as participants post more than they acknowledge having read or viewed
  
• That in contrast to the stock market's vertical asymmetry (of up vs down), communication media, or social media, have a horizontal asymmetry (or sending/receiving)
  
• That possibly all social systems are inherently asymmetrical, in that no system can provide complete knowledge, or truth, or proof, that the meaning we intend is the meaning understood by others, or that the meaning we make of others is the meaning they mean also
  
• That the asymmetry between one's own experience and the experiences of others will always subsist beneath any communication or transactional system (Markets: trust in the future, certainty, ability to anticipate future events; Social media: trust in relations, ambiguity of the audience's interest, unknowability of the other's attention and interest)
  
• And will be a fundamental experiential currency of that system (and that psychology is unavoidable when individuals use systems to mediate their relations)
  

What was the point of all this? To think through the comparison of market-based social systems and communication based social systems. And to pose the question: might the intrinsic asymmetry between production and consumption, between acting and reacting, between intending meaning and interpreting meaning, not always govern and organize our experiences and thus account for motives and behaviors?

All the Commentary That's Fit to Print

There is an interesting example of the disruptiveness and transformation of new and social media in the New York Times newspaper today. Unfortunately, it really only comes through in the print version. That's because in today's article on the mayor of Moscow's recent infrastucture investments in South Ossetia, the New York Times has elected to print comments posted originally to its livejournal blog.

It only hits you when holding the paper version of the Times how the conversational DNA of social media has changed the ecosystem for news overall. Even when reprinted in the New York Times, comments come across as the slightly off-color and perhaps off-key commentary that they are -- the boisterous and proud weltanschauung of their spirited Russian authors audible between, through, and behind the lines.

The Times may have wished to make Russian responses available to the domestic US audience, the blog's popularity having become a bit of news of its own. It may have wished to feature some of the many perspectives Russians hold on their iconoclastic mayor. Either way, seeing blog comments on paper drove home just what we mean by "distributed conversation," and "conversational media."

Russians React to Article on Moscow Mayor’s Ventures

Utilizing Social Media for Marketing: Tips

In our never-ending quest to define social media -- whether for ourselves or for our clients -- there's one tendency that stands out, and I think it's the result of a simple semantic slip. We refer to social media as if it were a thing, an object or technology, in short, a noun. Well yes, social media applications are tools and technologies. But social media is also a verb: : experiences, practices, conversation, talk. We switch back and forth sometimes between describing social media and its industry applications: social media marketing, distributed conversations, social networking. But in general, and in part because we are hail from the technology industry, we stand by the noun.

I'd like to explore the verb.

There are four views of social media that organize most of the industry's conversation:

• The builder's view from the perspective of technology


• The startup's view from the perspective of adoption


• The user's view from the perspective of experiences


• The marketer's view from the perspective of distribution

While each of these is valid on its own terms, none is sufficient by itself to describe "social media." But there is one view that is privileged, and that is the user's view. If an application fails to deliver a compelling user experience, there will be no application worth speaking about. No application adopted, no business funded, no market reached.

Now, social media are not just used by users. They're used also by the companies built around them; used by the advertisers advertising within them; and used by the designers and architects who build them. Since not one of these groups "owns" social media, and since none takes the position of the end user, who knows best what a social media tool should be like, how it works (in practice), or for what it is used?

If there's one thing in the way of PR, marketing, and advertising professionals succeeding in their use of social media, it's that many of us are limited by the interests that govern our perspective. Thankfully, we can learn a lot by taking positions other than our own. The builder learns from the user. The founder, from the marketer. The marketer from the user.

I'd like to attempt the marketer's perspective. How might social media best and most successfully serve their purposes?

In conversations with marketing professionals I often hear of the need for real case studies and examples. SNCR has many to cite. Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang continue to dig up gems. But for all the tools out there, we suffer a shortage of best practices and success stories.

A marketer might easily conclude that social media are not ready for distribution. But I think the challenge for social media in the marketplace is not in their lack of utility. Rather, I think, they're simply being under-utilized. Under-utilized not because the technologies are incapable of meeting the marketer's needs: but that the creative and campaigns deployed misuse the media.

These are tools and applications built by the people for use by the people. They were not not intended as new distribution channels for commercial messaging. Therefore any successful social media marketer should pack away the commerce and converse with authenticity. Users are not there to receive the messages of marketers, but are there for their own purposes. There's a connecting line between the phone line and online, and that line is drawn between the commercial and the personal.

Social media serve highly local, personal, and episodic purposes. Conversations are fast, disjointed, and discontinuous. In other words, they have little in common with mass media and broadcasting. Talk starts with the user more than with published content. It unfolds in front of an audience on the medium, not outside of it. Commercial participation needs to come off the screen and embed itself.

Can it? I think yes, if the marketing perspective takes the position of the user.

We're talking about a shift in marketing from impression to expression, and from image to relationship. Messages will get recognition if they are meaningful. And they will get "distribution" if they are retaleable. On blogs, PR and marketing want to be contextual. On social networking sites, marketing and advertising wants to be actionable.

Social media and mass media have one thing in common: communication. So let's look at the communication needs of the industries most interested in reaching social media: PR, marketing, and advertising.

PR

• the content is news, the mode is the release, the form is a brief (narrative), the connections possible are to the company profiled, the news announced, the testimonials offered, the persons involved.
  

Marketing

• the content is image, mode is a branding campaign (image + message), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are consumer interest, impressions, and associations with the message's connotations and thrust.
  

Advertising

• the content is an offer, mode is campaign with call to action (image + call to action), the form can take multiple media, the connections possible are the relevance and appeal of the offer, and means by which to act on it.
  

The above are descriptions of how commerce seeks to benefit from communications media, be they mass or social. But if we believe that users run social media according to their own interests, how do commercial concerns ply their craft in an industry that is user-centric? What do they do differently to participate in the language of social media users?

Let's take a look at three distinguishing aspects of social media: their transformation of how we talk, how that talk is distributed, and what kinds of relationships we maintain while talking.

Social media provide new forms of talk, using multiple media types, across many different platforms, in long and short form, in front of different kinds of audiences, and appearing of course in a diverse number of forms: from pages to "streams." Commercial interests need to learn these forms of talk, as they would need to learn any new mass media format. Because most campaigns still rely heavily on banner and display advertising, the opportunities ahead for embedded and conversational advertising are great.

We might consider, for example:

• New socially-interactive ad units


• New types of content, group, event, and conversation sponsorship


• New advertising units to take advantage of the medium's many kinds of talk: reviews, recommendations, invitations, questions and answers, tweets, feeds, and so on


• New types of social games with embedded and actionable (playable) ads


• New kinds of narrative, including branching and participatory stories


• Feed-based marketing that offers event tickets, time-sensitive discounts, and so on to friends


• Sponsored reviews and recommendations appealing to those who spot trends and share discoveries


• Question/Answer formats appealing to end user expertise

Social media provide new means of distribution, using many social platforms, on which different kinds of audiences are assembled, for talk that is fast or slow, structured or loose, categorized or streaming, and using all media types available (text, message, video, game, animation, audio). Commercial interests might implement campaigns in multiple media types and for different applications. Here again, interactive and online ad agencies are still using conventional web 1.0 approaches, so there are wins ahead for new creative efforts.

We might consider, for example:

• Feed-based marketing


• Feed-based and direct-action advertising offers


• Social applications built around popular online social activities


• Social ad networks


• Mobile promotions tied to location or social networks


• User interest-based and targeted promotions

Social media offer new types of relationship, including closed groups of affiliates, colleagues, co-workers, and friends, friend-networks, follower audiences, blog subscribers, and more. Commercial interests can appeal to the network as well as the individual, or to the audience and context in general. And again, many departments would rather run their campaigns from the sidelines, and opt out of directly engaging the social media conversation space. The opportunities for success here, I suspect, are a matter of the depth of engagement commercial interests are willing to test.

Here we might consider:

• Commercial marketing to and through influencers


• Event offers and promotions distributed through inviters


• Branding and advertising to the social graph through top recommenders and influencers


• Group sales and promotions to social networks and trust circles

I feel that I have only touched on what can yet be done. With the user's permission (and that is a big "if," I'll admit, but that said, we love brands and we identify through commodities, so...) there is room for a new kind of "adversation" or "convertising." Consumer interests in consumption and things consumed are real, and genuine -- the threat of spam or commercialization is a matter of how it is handled.

I began by claiming that social media were as much a verb as a noun. Well, so the contents of media are people. People are fragile. But they can be moved. Simply handle with care.

Inspiration from Elsewhere: Social Media and Film Theory

Summertime rolls on here, and when the weather is this good I have a hard time staying online. Months of cold fog and wind loom in the coming winter months; these days of lazy autumnal warmth beckon to be enjoyed. Panic in the markets and economic distress all around haven't been good for job prospecting of late. So my gut instinct this past week saw me outside with books and a thinking cap.

Which has all been very inspirational, as it turns out. There are times when inspiration comes from elsewhere. I found it this week in film theory. I enjoy film theory primarily because I'm a film nut. Film is the art form of the twentieth century, and as it incorporates image, technology, dialog, story, genres, production, characters, performance, and industry, it epitomizes the artistic and creative opportunities of modern times. Like social media and web cultures, film is fascinating both as a medium and as a cultural production. It can be enjoyed as is, and when thought about.

Dipping back into the film theory of Gilles Deleuze this week, I re-discovered a number of concepts that have me very excited. They had to do with my three part model of the social media user experience, and with the construction of various narrative forms in film. The former has me thrilled because the three part model keeps popping up in a number of theories and their resonance with an approach to social media interaction design is encouraging, to say the least. The latter has me thrilled because I've been scratching my head of late when it comes to applications of social media in marketing and branding -- and the huge variety of narrative and film forms explored in film theory offers a cornucopia of ideas for online conversational marketing.

I just want to touch on these briefly, because it may be a while before I'm able to punch out in-depth blog posts. So if you are a theory geek, or interested in how social interaction design can draw from film theory, read on. I'll post later on how these ideas may be applied by practitioners and organizations. I know it doesn't take a film theorist to make a good film -- but it is fun to find confirmation in theory of what makes the film good.

Deleuze uses the sign system, or semiotics, developed by Charles Saunders Peirce to build a system of "images" and signs designed for film, which is unique in that it produces not only image but time. I've written about the difference between page and time-based social media recently -- and I often return to film theory because it offers a means of understanding how time is captured in contemporary representational media. (Where social media differ, of course, is that time is captured in the medium -- take twitter as the best example of a tool that organizes content chronologically -- but is not experienced or consumed in a straight and continuous run of time. Time is continuous in film; discontinuous i social media. And yet in both, time is an ordering principle for the presentation of content to the user/consumer.)

Peirce's signs are, to simplify, the firstness of the thing itself; the secondness of a thing reflected, and the thirdness of a relation. Very cool to me, as my model is based on Self, Other, and Relation. The resonance here works well for social media because the "firstness" relates to the content of a user's direct and immediate expression of Self online; the secondness relates the reflection and orientation to another user (Other); and thirdness to the relationships and social relations captured in social activity (Relation). I had been thinking that my Self, Other, Relation approach resonated well with a view of social relations that distinguishes among monadic, dyadic, and triadic organization. Monadic being Self expression, Dyadic being interpersonal interaction, and Triadic being mediating and relationship-oriented interaction. I know this is theoretical stuff, but the three-part model keeps coming up, and I think that thinking in terms of individuals, pairs, and threesomes (or groups) makes sense as a means of grasping the nature of "social" online.

What Deleuze's film theory brings to theory of film "genres" (a term he would disapprove of) and film forms (he calls them "images") is also contributing to my approach to conversational marketing. I've been thinking of late that the key to social media branding involves first moving away from an "image branding" approach to one that is more communicative and participatory. But getting from the insight to actual applications has been a challenge. Knowing that the medium is young yet, and using film theory and history as a source of comparisons, however, has opened up possibilities for what the future may still hold. If commercial efforts are to successfully use social media at all, I don't expect it to be by simply extending mass media branding and marketing approaches. The arrival of the talkies, and development of filmic techniques (inventions in camera work, lighting, editing, montage, and so on) as well as framing and an acute understanding of the effects of film, have all conspired to produce fascinating forms of entertainment.

I really think the current social media landscape is practically waiting for creatives to take over where the engineers have left off. Would you want television designers to be responsible for what's on your TV? Well that's where we are today: having built the stuff we need the content creatives now to show us what we can do with it.

So back now to summertime ideating -- and to bringing concepts into the daylight.


Related:
My own research notes on the theorists Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Harold Garfinkel in relation to understanding social media, and theorizing social interaction design.

A Social Interaction Design Primer

Current business conditions are unforgiving, and seem to be taking their toll on the social media industry, whether it's in the mood on Sand Hill, in the decline of online advertising, or even in the prognosis for Web 2.0 at large. I penned a reflective piece yesterday in which I suggested that companies in this space do more to enhance the user experience, or suffer through the coming Darwinian fight for survival. While execs work to define their business models, I'd like to attempt to capture the basics of social media user experience. For the business all of us are in, at the end of the day, hangs on the participation of users.

Years ago Alan Cooper published a book that has become a classic among designers. Titled Inmates Are Running The Asylum, it set a framework for interaction design based on respecting the user and her needs, goals, and objectives. User-centric design is now the de facto approach taken by software, product, interaction, and all manner of designers, including social media designers. In fact our industry, perhaps more than any other, relies on delivering compelling user experiences for its success. Users are our business model, and failure to engage users not only kills participation, but all other aspects of a social media company's business also.

As a self-proclaimed social media expert, I'm often asked by companies how to "get users to do" more of this or less of that. Clients understandably identify with their product, and with what they designed it for. But in social media, users do what they think a site or service is for, and not necessarily what it's designers intended. So I begin an engagement by asking clients to view their product from the user's perspective. Many small companies do not have a user experience designer on staff, and rely heavily on best practices to steer feature and interface design.

But user experience matters in social media are more complicated than in non-social software. For example, the conventional user-centric view starts with user needs and goals. In social media these are not necessarily rational and objective. They can be much more psychological, and social, for example. Furthermore, the interactions that users have are not just with the software application -- they are with other users (through the software). The UI is not an interface to discrete actions and transactions (such as your online banking site); it is a social interface, and through it users feel like they are interacting with friends and audiences.

This complicates matters somewhat for the standard interaction design approach. If the task of conventional software is to provide successful interactions, to inform the user that his actions worked, then what of social media? Communication is by definition an open-ended transaction, not a discrete one. Take the example of a dating site: one user pings another, by messaging or gesture, and hopes to hear back. Does the software designer want to provide a status message about the recipient's interest? "Your message was received but she's thinking about it. Please be patient."? Likely not. In fact, the dating site wants to keep its users on the hook for as long as possible. Ambiguity is in its interest -- not clarity and transparency.

We can go one further in distinguishing social interaction design (as I call it, or SxD) from standard user experience and interaction design. For in social software, failure works. Take twitter for example, which is not used for SMS-Web messaging as originally intended, and which hooks many users because in social communication and interaction terms, it is kind of upside-down and in reverse. Users don't choose who they are talking to. When they post, their tweet appears in "thread" that is a false representation because their post appears next to the tweets of those they follow, not those who follow them. And there is an asymmetry between posting and reading such that users are required to declare their presence. Where a chat room or IM application is designed to capture users' presence, twitter does the reverse. Users have to declare their presence and attention by using (@ or direct messages): "@username, Nice post!"

Social interaction design works by respecting the psychological and social, the ambiguity not the clarity, the unintended not the intended. The best a designer can do is set up a social architecture that structures and organizes participation well enough that users know what's going on, and therefore what to do. Social interaction designers start not from user needs but from user interests.

The bottom line for any social media company is know your users. Here again, social interaction design differs from non-social design. There is not just one user. There are not even several "personas." Instead, users differ by their communication and interaction styles, their ways of being social, their understanding of what they are doing and of what others are doing. For simplicity's sake, I segment users according to three types of interest: Self Interest, Other Interest, and Relational Interest. This comes from contemporary sociology and psychology, and goes roughly like this:

Self-interested users act from a position of Self
Other-interested users react to an Other (user)
Relationally-interested users interact through social activity

To provide a few examples, there are Facebook users whose activity centers on their own profile, which is a representation of their Self and an extension of it (into the mediated social world that is Facebook). These users may not even visit their friends' profiles. They interact around their own status updates, wall posts, profile page elements, and so on. Then there are Facebook users who spend more time browsing their friends' profiles, posting to their walls, reading their friends' updates. They do not begin communication on their own pages, talking about themselves, but begin by responding to a friend's post or update. There are then those in the third group, the socializers if you will, who play the numerous Facebook social apps. Drawn to social activity, they go where the action is.

We can see this on twitter, also. Some users post to their audiences about themelves. Some, finding this weird, read first and are inclined to respond. And others get into rounds of conversation, often including their friends by @naming them in their posts.

These are rough distinctions, and I will be the first to admit that there is no research as of yet into their viability. But they correspond to similar distinctions made by psychologists and sociologists, and after a year of thinking about core social interaction design principles, I have yet to come up with anything better.

And as it turns out, a similar three-part approach works for the user interface, which I call the social interface. Standard UI theory comes up short here also, because the UI is not only a representation of software features and functions, but is a medium through which users engage with other users. Imagine that you are sitting across from a friend. There is a screen between the two of you. Now in social media, that screen has three modes. It may be a mirror, and you see yourself reflected. Or it is a surface, and you see what your friend has posted on it. Or it is a window, and you can talk through it with your friend.

Design requirements are different for each mode. In the mirror mode, the interface should present an engaging and compelling reflection. In the surface mode, it should organize and structure content and navigation. And in the window mode, it should become transparent and unobtrusive.

Now these modes of the interface correspond nicely to our three user types. Self-interested users may engage in their projection and expression of themselves (mirror); Other-interested users may respond and talk to others (window). And Relationally-interested users may go where the action is (surface).

Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theory, claimed that every new medium uses an old medium as its content. Social media use mass media for much of their content, and moreso for how to organize and lay out that content. We use print, web 1.0, software application UIs, as well as television, cameras, and radio. But we cannot understand how social media are used if we do not first understand what interests our users, in being on social media, in using them to connect and relate, and in reading what users have left behind.

This is still a very young medium, and there is much yet to come by way of innovating time-based conversation and self-presentation tools (see my brief on Swurl and a piece on designing for lifestreaming). I expect more innovation of the presentation layer, by means of Flash, for example. And of course there is mobile, which we are only beginning to mine for new and compelling experienced.

But if you are in the social media space, and feel that your product captures a good 80% of current uses and best practices (in terms of features and design), you might now invest the next 20% in cementing the user experience. I will post again soon with specific ideas for identifying your core user types and improving user experiences to raise participation levels.



For those of you who are interested in more, see:
Slideshare presenations on What Is Social Interaction Design, User Psychology, and User Competencies (or go here to download originals)
White papers

Darwin days are here again, or, the Led balloon

In this Mother of all Meltdowns, tech talk is bound to turn to matters of survival and endurance. While the market may have let out a sigh of relief today, fundamentals are grim all around. A world-wide economic contraction is under way, and any pause in the financial market's panic is likely to be only fleeting.

But as I like to say, mother is the necessity of invention. And invention is the mother of all silicon valley companies. Mashable today runs a brief on how to draw inspiration from hard times: Recession is the Mother of Tech Invention. Can social media startups take advantage of tough times to push innovation farther and faster?

It is not just the pressure cooker of economic distress that drives innovation, however. It is also the end of the honeymoon, the days of daily evangelism that characterize the good times in the new tech world. The optimism of tech innovators is greatest when the "new" is in "tech," and the tech is new. It's an optimism fueled by early adopters and the blush of breaking industry news. The forward-looking anticipation of an upward-trending line, whether that line traces a growing user base, feats of financing, market adoption, traffic, or plain-old revenues.

It's not that optimism would be misplaced during times like these -- if it's optimism grounded in reality and based on defensible claims. It's just that the overall mood is now anxious, fearful, and uncertain. The future no longer looks bright. It's time for the sunglasses to come off.

For those of us who count on our vision for a living, sunglasses never were much of a help. But now that the future is less clear, foresight may have to depend more on insight than on eyesight. It is time now for innovators to see what they can do with what they have.

When times get tough, the mood in tech swings from excitement to trepidation. No longer do we assume that growth is eternal. No longer do we count on the cooperation of consumers, the attraction of advertisers, or the news of the new. No longer do we spend our days fixed on the daily counters: those statistics that are to the web world the vital signs of our health and wellness. Like the markets around us, we, too, adopt a flight to quality. We start measuring what counts.

The great qualitative reckoning is nigh upon us, like some monster industrial combine come harvest time, a rumbling thrasher chewing chaff for its wheat: Darwin days for the social web machine.

But the fittest will survive, and funding and financing aside, innovation will clock its progress even in tough times. A flight to quality will bring better and more useful features and designs. User experience will preside over technical developments, and real social utility will drive the engine of growth. We will strip away what we don't need and focus on what we do. And as the climate changes, so too will our paradigms.

Lest conservation threaten innovation, this generation too will learn that invention does not end with self-preservation. It will learn that what matters is not the survival of an individual (company), but rather the species. That the design is in the social, in the milieu, or the ecosystem. Ours is an ecology of new socio-technical practices, a culture of communication that thrives within an environment of emerging habits of use. The companies that survive in these changing conditions will be those that best understand their cultures. Not their own company traits, features, or attributes, but the activities that they help to enable.

Social media companies today need to know not what they do, but what users do with them. Not what they are like, but why users like them. Not who they are, but who their users are. Companies that innovate only on the basis of what they are, and not for how they are used, will fail to see how and where they belong in their environment. The environment has changed, and success will come to those best suited and adapted to these new conditions.

It would be wise for us now to lose some of the hubris that can work so well during the good times, and to adopt some of the realism better suited for bad times. For according to the laws of natural selection, it is not the species that select their environment. It is the environment that does the selection.

The Now Web: Not Now, or Not Yet?

I have my Stanford reunion coming up tomorrow. At the risk of dating myself, it's my twentieth. I wrote my thesis at Stanford on an Apple Macinthosh, which required swapping out floppy discs in order to run Microsoft Word (on one) with my ever-expanding tome on the other. Drafts were printed on a dot matrix printer, and in the final weeks of each quarter Meyer Library was overcome with a chattering morse-like din that I can recall to this day. It was our version of an echo chamber.

For we did not have email. We did not even have modems.

In preparation for the reunion, some of us have encouraged our classmates to join Facebook. Of a class of about 1650 students, around 300 of us are on Facebook, and 80 of those 300 have joined the reunion group page. Only ten of us have listed twitter accounts. Clearly, we belong to a different generation. We stand for the Not Now social media users. Or possibly, the Not Yet social media users.

I don't know if this speaks to a generation gap or an experience gap. But if I belong to a generation that "doesn't get" social media, it is not entirely because we're computer illiterates. Many of my classmates have had rockstar careers in the tech industry. I seem to remember that some 40% of Oracle's new employees in 1989 were recent Stanford grads. If anything, we are a bridge generation: the first to use desktops, but prior to the domestication of the Internet.

The experience gap is not inexperience with machines, but is inexperience with their unique kind of social presence and interaction. We're not used to the practice of posting profiles about ourselves (I exclude myself), and of keeping constant contact (in a discontinuous and partial sort of way) with friends and colleagues. We're phone-based and email-based, and at our stage in life, time simply doesn't afford us the surplus attention with which to attach ourselves to the social web.

Time would be the reason most of us would cite for our online invisibility. But I think that there's something more.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it the "alienation" of social media. To integrate social media into your daily life you need to project yourself into it. You need to be able to live in a kind of time that's very different from the time of the everyday. You need to be able to pay attention without bankrupting your focus and concentration, need to be able to sustain high levels of availability to a world that's neither "here" nor "there," again, without dissociating from the here and now.

Computers were, to my generation, a tool, machine, an object: outside of us. We learned to use them as a means of extending our abilities and activities. In McLuhan's classic use of the phrase, computers were an extension of us. An extension, but nothing more. The machine was an object, and anything we did with it, and it with us, was simply that. The PC was an object, not a world. Turn it off, and nothing.

The social web is more than McLuhan could have seen. The social web is not an "extension of man" but a "network." By dint of its connectivity, it has communication. By dint of communication, it has relationships. By dint of relationships, it is a world. And as a world, it is in time. Those of us who are frequent users of social media know this time as a sense that there's ongoing activity "out there" -- regardless of whether we're on or in it at the time. Turn off the machine today, and wait.

To know what a social technology does, turn it off, not on. What is does is what you miss.

Fred Wilson describes the Now Web as the breed of "micro-blogging" applications and services we know from Twitter's storied success this year. A raft of lifestreaming applications now serve users who, unlike much of my generation, can and do live (at least for a time) in social media. I think the reference to "web" and "blogging" for tools in this space is a misnomer. For they're not really writing tools, but speaking tools. With a different kind of speaking, and of conversation, of course.

If profile-based social networking sites are page-based, lifestreaming apps are time-based.

The Now Web is engaged in not by writing (blogging), but by being in the flow (or by observing the flow from the river's edge, if that be your preference). The needs of time-based applications are different from those of the "conventional" web. If web 1.0 is page-based and print-derived, now-web is time-based and radio-derived.

Twitter is the internet generation's ham radio.

The businesses and applications designed around twitter, its siblings and cousins, will do well to consider the ways we relate to content and communication when it is time-based (further thoughts on designing lifestreaming apps).

• We are less likely to search, more likely to browse, skim, or check.
  
• Content comes in the form of news, announcements, reminders, and greetings -- speech-based acts not written reflections, arguments, or opinions.
  
• Messages lay a claim to our attention in the present -- not later or whenever is good for us.
  
• Content is organized around the now, which lacks the structure of taxonomy, genre, or other form.
  
• And if written content makes a claim to thinking, lifestreamed content is more likely to make a claim to attention: we engage in social encounters through our mutual acknowledgment and awareness of one another
  
• If the claims made in written content are "linguistic" -- that is, they are linguistically-mediated expressions -- lifestreamed content is more likely to be gestural, suggestive, indicative, relational.
  
• If the appeal made in written content is designed through statements, arguments, or narratives, then in the world of lifestreaming, it is more likely to be an appeal to acknowledgment and awareness.
  

Every medium screens back physical participation in communication and interaction, while also amplifying particular modes of expression and engagement. Lifestreaming applications screen back the sense of being in time, and of being with others in time. But they extend and amplify time by connecting multiple threads of time (each of us having our own).

It's early days yet for time-based social media and for social interaction design frameworks best suited to them. As we develop designs, interfaces, features, and new ways of engaging with others, with content, and with timelines appropriate to time-based and not page based social media, I suspect that we will be surprised. I believe the word is "serendipity": the discovery of something surprising that comes at just the right time.

Dipping into Dipity -- scaleable timelines

I'm quite enjoying playing around with Dipity. The site falls another lifestreaming app, butwhere many run the stream vertically, and page-by-page, dipity uses a horizontal timeline display. You can zoom in on the timeline scale to drill down. And in addition, it shows posted content by flip book, lists, and maps.

It's great to see innovation at the presentation layer like this. While those of us "in the stream" much of the time may not make much use of stream histories or archives (excepting by search), the view here would be a value add to those monitoring and tracking Twitter.

I could see a conversational map done in this fashion, perhaps using loops or circuits. Similarly, network graphs built around replies as well as shared followers. It would be cool, too, to see scatter plots of memes for high volume activity. Visualizations like this may not be the best applications for daily use, in particular, but they can help simplify and process of filtering and browsing through high-volume messages. A hashtags application of the timeline, for example, plotted as a trendline with scatter points.

My congratulations to the team. This is looking good!

Here's a timeline on the topic Meltdown_2008. (I can't speak to whether or not the timeline's long sense of history should be read as in indictment of economic policy, or simply a wikification of current news!)

Social media and the job of PR

I have to admit that my gut reaction to PR on twitter is a sinking one. It makes me wonder if the party's over -- if the spamification of twitter is just around the corner, and it's time to migrate once again. Foolish thoughts, or not. All new media mainstream at some point during their lifecycle. And yes, early adopters and core users often flee in droves for smaller and as yet undiscovered niche services. But I digress.

Twitter would seem a perfect tool for Public Relations. It's a posting service. Links can be embedded, and tracked. It is conversational but it's not immersive like IM or chat. And it's essentially opt in, insofar as users elect to follow you.

But social media PR folks like to recommend to their clients that they adopt micro media and conversational tools. "Join the conversation!" was the refrain we heard most over the past year. So where does public relations then rest? With the PR firm or with the company itself?

Sabrina Horn, head of the Horn Group, is quoted in a piece by Tom Foremski on social media adoption:

""Eventually social media will replace a lot of traditional PR but there will still be room for both," says Ms. Horn. And companies need to understand the best combination for their business. She says some clients want to rush into "social media" without considering what it means and the commitment that has to be made."

Every company is a media company . . .

I've often spoken about how every company is now a media company and needs to master the new media technologies at our disposal, such as RSS, blogging, Twitter, social media, etc. But being a media company requires a commitment, it is not a "campaign" that runs for a few months and finishes--it is a long term commitment and not everyone understands this aspect and what that means."

True indeed, and I fully agree that social media use should be mutually-engaging. Company and customer. Reciprocity is essential for trust, and is a core value principle in social media generally speaking.

One of the key benefits of social media engagement, however, is supposed to be what can take place when companies embrace transparency and open-ness. Communication with customers is supposed to result in opportunities for co-collaboration (around products, services, customer service, and so on).

So my question for PR firms, then, is: who handles the social media campaign? PR or client? If the PR agency handles it, is it incented to be honest with its client about user feedback, commentary, and sentiment? If the client uses it, can it handle itself as well as the PR agency -- does the client risk damaging PR campaigns if it gets involved directly? Just who is the best person, and in which organization, to serve as "spokesperson" in social media?

Startup your Social: Enhance Your Social Utility

Financial news of the world this week may now be sinking in amongst the hereto protected economy of the startup world. Many of us will now hold more tightly onto the purse strings in the hopes of stretching out what might be a finite runway to success. I went through this, like many, eight years ago, and the quiet that followed wasn't much fun.

But there's still time for many to make it work. If I were at a VC firm, or heading up a startup today, I'd look more closely now than ever at product and service differentiation. If you have now built the application, done the engineering, and established a user base, now is time to focus on social interaction design. Don't stop at technology design. And while you might be compelled to integrate the features that are quickly becoming standard among social web applications, don't stop there either. Think further and harder about your designing your social interactions. Your equity is in your users and how they use your product — that's the utility, personal and social, that you should leverage to distinguish yourself and capitalize on success.

Here are just a few thoughts and tips that I've gleaned from working with startups and from analyzing the sites I've used:

Users have Personalities
All users are not alike. And this is more important among social media users than in any other kind of designed product. Those users that get the most out of your site or application are the ones that will attract further growth.

In social media, for example, users have different ways of talking and communicating. They have different relationships to other users, and to audiences in general. Different ways of using and consuming information. And different perceptions of social trends. (I'm oversimplifying to keep this short.)

Personality types
Here are some personality types -- you will recognize which would use your site, and for what:

Self-talkers: these are users who are comfortable talking about themselves in front of an online audience (including but not limited to friends). Posting, tweeting, and sharing are simple and straightforward ways of using social media. (Note that the vast majority of people find social media use to be somewhat narcissistic, or juvenile, and don't connect with the self-promotion prevalent in social networking and conversation media. But they're not our users.) These users are important content creators and activity contributors.

EmCees: these are users who get people together, who link, distribute, circulate posts and comments. They are on stage, but not to speak their own minds. Rather, they participate by acknowledging and recognizing those they respect (and often, want to be associated with). These users are important connectors and facilitators.

Mediators: these are users who are aware of "where people are at" and who attend to relationships, both their own and those of others. These users are not on stage but are active in the audience. They are important care-takers.

Critics: these users deepen conversation and forward the ideas suggested by many of the self-talkers. They explore, research, and often read more than self-talkers. Their contributions are important for the richness and discovery of social media content.

Experts: these users, like critics, go deep, but they enjoy being known as experts and protect and serve their reputations. Where a critic may be committed to truth or integrity, and to the content itself, the expert draws that content expertise around him or herself. Expert contributions are important because so many of us follow experts and their recommendations.

Inviters: Inviters use social media to maintain a family or network of people they care about enough to invite (to stuff). They mine the web for events, activities, and news and are happy to share it because it keeps them and their networks active -- without drawing attention to what they themselves have to contribute. Inviters gain from distribution and are critical to the medium's service to events.

there are more, such as jokers, seducers, organizers, and lurkers, but in the interest of time....

Use Cases
Use cases for your service fall into two categories: individual user use case and social use cases. Each is important. You probably know your individual use cases -- and in fact were probably building with those in mind. They have to do with conventional uses and utility, but also include psychological payoff and reward (see above for what hooks different kinds of users).

Social use cases are more complex. Most social media promise utility in use -- that is in the act of using the tool. But many also promise utility and value in what's left behind for later consumption, e.g. by non-participants. Yelpers may enjoy reviewing and networking, but the majority of Yelp's pageviews come from non-users. So if you have a service that leverages user participation to create content (niche vertical, topic, theme, community of practice) make sure that your social features lend themselves to high-value content for those non participants also.

Social Practices
Social practices are what come out of individual use when individual user activity is aggregated. You can offer the individual user an experience but have little control over the emergent social practices. Stories of social media engendering unintended practices abound, and if the practice you facilitate is against your business objectives, you're in trouble. Dating or "hooking up" can kill a service that's intended for serious use. As a lack of flirting may kill a site that is supposed to be high in emotion.


Those are just a few tips. I think social interaction design is a vastly under-stated aspect of social media -- and is as important as technology on which it rests.


Related:
My slide shows on social interaction design, psychology of the user experience, and social media user competencies
Fred Wilson's My Thoughts On "Startup Depression"
Techcrunch roundup of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn

News and Feeds: Power Curve to the Long Tail?

The web, and the social web in particular, has been hailed for its contribution to a new economic principle: the long tail. It was brought to our attention convincingly a couple years back by Wired editor Chris Anderson, and has since enjoyed its own long tail of popularity. The argument goes, basically, that the web's connectedness, combined with its increasing use as communication among users, not only sustains but often accretes visibility to qualified products and services *over time*.

The marketing blitz favored by short-term and launch campaigns (the power curve) calls upon the attention supplied during a curious and enthusiastic audience. The long tail offers the opportunity for a much more slowly accumulating span of attention, which is the attention brought to the product or service by the interested user. Where the power curve delivers newsworthy results, the long tail delivers powerpoint-ready follow through.

Long tail is the discovery economy. It's a sort of "socialization of search results" -- it works by qualifying the value of results by means of social participation. The big stories in long retail have been entertainment and media consumption, e.g. Netflix, Yelp, Amazon, and so on: sites that enable discovery along the lines of "what I like" by means of meta data captured through site use and social participation along the lines of "things that are alike" and possibly "liked by members who are alike" and/or "liked by like-minded members" (the difference is associating people on the basis of what they like or whether they seem alike: interests vs. identities)...

Long tail works by talk -- a kind of structured talk (because it captures the declaration of like, the level of like, the likes associated, and then of course cross-indexes those with item data and meta data such as category, genre, etc). So it works because it happens when users are interested. And a user who is interested, like a user who is searching, is a good indicator of value and relevance.

Now let's consider the dramatic growth in conversational media: represented by tools like twitter and friendfeed. These are not tools designed to capture content in depth. Nor do they extract much by way of meta data, taxonomic relations, etc. They're designed for simplicity and used for a faster form of talk than we get in walled-garden social networking sites. But as there is a great deal of activity in the conversation, much of it highly relevant and most of it uniquely particular to its users, it behooves us to ask: what value can be extracted from the content and relationships of conversational media?

Where in these media would an advertiser wish to be? In the tweet? Between tweets? Alongside the twitterer, his or her stream, with or without friends? Or perhaps in search results? Hashtagged? ... You get the picture. Advertising always wants to be placed in the best context possible -- but the context of conversational media is highly biased towards use and utility. If twitter were ham radio, the context of use would be the microphone; the context advertisers know to recognize is not the microphone, but what comes out of the speaker. What gives conversational media their utility is their functionality. To use another analogy, we don't use phones for listening -- hence our resistance to tele-marketing. Of course, I have a suspicion, unproven, that far more attention is paid by twitters to the tweeting than to the tweet reading. That's a bias I think is shared by all posting media, and a reason for their high redundancy of communication.

There is enormous interest by third parties and by media-related businesses in the rise of conversational media. They want to know how to leverage these tools for their own purposes, be this through participation and engagement, or by monitoring and tracking. Social media marketing and advertising will mine status, news, activity, and other self-talk and conversational feeds for the kinds of valued relationships (people to people, people to things, events, etc) and associations (people in groups, audiences; things in groups, categories) they contain. The strategy here, however, may not be long tail.

Indeed the coming feed market may want to think in terms of the power curve. The personal and social news-making they are mostly used for have more in common with the power curve of news in general than they do with in-depth discovery. You might argue that discovery is surfaced through conversational tools, as in the blogs we read and then tweet to. Conversational monitors, and tools like Radian6, Buzzlogic, and smaller twitter monitoring apps, might then combine deep blog crawling for long tail value, and feed/conversational content for the power curve (breaking news, memes, viral, etc).

It will be interesting to see where this goes. I don't think that the influencer approach most often cited as a model for conversational value is the be all and end all. It comes out of social networking models, and misses the conversational dynamics of talk tools. I suspect that the best mining applications will take a time-oriented approach over a network-based approach. (The network of followers is no network, it's a list, and there's no guarantee that the audience represented by a list of followers is paying attention to the stream).

Conversational media are short on content and long on activity. But if the medium is the message, the message value of conversation media may be on the envelope.